


The Lady and the Dragon

by lilacsigil



Category: Excalibur (Comic)
Genre: Cross-Time Caper, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 11:44:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/86929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/pseuds/lilacsigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Cross-Time Caper continues apace, and Kurt has a thrilling tale to tell Kitty and Rachel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lady and the Dragon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilith/gifts).



"Hang on!" Kitty grabbed for Kurt's wrists as he clung on to a rail on the side of the wildly rocking train. Even his agile fingers and tail were barely able to keep him in place as the train leapt and bucked across a field of flowers that shot tiny fireworks, then plummeted down a cascade of shredded photographs. Kitty phased her head through the side of the train into the carriage where Rachel was sleeping. "Rach! Help!"

Rachel was awake even before Kitty had finished saying her name - she never did sleep soundly, the alertness ingrained in her by her catastrophic home timeline - and flexed her telekinesis to pull Kurt safely aboard within the space of a heartbeat. Kitty phased the two of them through the wall of the carriage and into the cosy, slightly overheated sleeper car.

A carriage on a hijacked, ex-Nazi, interdimensional Phoenix-powered train was always going to look a little different to a regular carriage, not the least because Widget, powering the train, had borrowed Rachel's energy to reshape it to something that didn't make the members of Excalibur so uncomfortable - giant swastikas were not the most restful design. Instead, the room looked as if Kitty's mother's living room had been squashed into a gypsy caravan, with extra-secure bars on the windows. Rachel had been sleeping on a tiny bunk up against the curved wall, and Kitty and Kurt dropped down onto a folded out sofa bed, their fall softened by a hand-stitched crazy quilt. "Your nose is bleeding!" Kitty handed Kurt a Kleenex from a tissue dispensing box shaped like a duck, and he gratefully dabbed at the scarlet trickle from his nose.

"I would thank you, Kätzchen, but it was you who gave me this injury in the first place."

"Oh no!" Kitty gave him a whole handful of Kleenex and patted his free hand soothingly. More alarming than all the threats of death and destruction, on a cross-dimensional cross-time adventure, had been the alternate versions of friends, family and themselves that Excalibur had met. Not all of them had been friendly, and few of them behaved as expected. Worst of all, though, had been Rachel's discovery - she didn't even seem to exist in any other dimension. Whether that meant that the chain of coincidence that had let her exist in one was so extremely tenuous as to not survive elsewhere, or whether the universe could only deal with one of her, nobody knew.

"What was Kitty up to this time?" Rachel asked with interest, wrapping her warm woollen blankets around herself and sitting cross-legged on her bunk. "And did you run into Brian or Meggan?"

"No, I didn't see them at all. But you've got Lockheed back!" Kurt pointed at the little dragon, who was happily curled up at the bottom of the quilt.

Kitty rolled her eyes. "Oh, it turned out that he wasn't missing at all, actually. He was just making really good friends with the smokestack on top of the engine. I don't know why, it's not as if any smoke comes out of it. I think Widget might have a lock on wherever Brian is, though - we keep ending up in places with Union Jacks everywhere."

"Good, good. We don't want to lose anyone in an alternate dimension."

"Hey!" Rachel made an exaggerated frown. "You didn't tell me why Kitty punched you in the nose!"

"Ah. It is a little embarrassing."

Kitty hopped up on the bunk with Rachel, snuggling into her blankets. "Then I can't wait!" She paused for a second. "I hope you don't mean 'embarrassing to Kitty', because I think I've really had enough of those kind of dimensions for a while."

"No, no, you were in fine form. It is I who made the mistake."

"Okay, that's all right then. Carry on!" Kitty waved her hand in her grandest manner.

"Well, when we all popped out of the back of the train after it tried to squeeze through that pinhole in space, I ended up in some kind of medieval landscape - where did you girls end up, by the way?"

"This weird undersea kingdom where all the fish sang." Kitty made a face. "You did notice we're in bathrobes here!"

Kurt took in their slightly dishevelled appearance, Rachel's hair damp and Kitty's in a towel, and made a face right back at Kitty. "I'm glad I wasn't there, then. I hate getting salt water on my fur. So, I landed in a great big tree, and looked about me, but the rest of the team was nowhere to be seen. I climbed down and started walking towards the only landmark I could see, a tall white tower.

"As I got closer, I came across a road and some travellers - they looked scared, but not by my appearance. They kept looking over at the tower, and hurrying along. I asked them what was happening, and they told me that they were terrified of being eaten by the great big flame-shooting dragon that lived in that tower."

"Poor things!" Kitty looked very sympathetic. "I don't see why dragons have to especially go and eat humans all the time. Maybe someone should take them a pizza once in a while."

Rachel punched her in the arm, affectionately. "Kitty Pryde, native of Chicago, saving lives through pizza! "

"It seems," Kurt continued, "That no-one had thought to take this dragon a pizza. In fact, it was guarding a prisoner in the tower, the travellers told me, and the prisoner was the beautiful Princess Katherine."

"Blech! Why do I always have to be the princess? This is, like, the third time! Don't any of these dimensions need, I don't know, computer programmers? Or superheroes? Or theoretical physicists?"

"It's because you are a beautiful young lady, Kätzchen."

"I'm a beautiful young lady, and I'm not in any of these dimensions, let alone a princess," Rachel tried to smile, but the hard line of her mouth belied her light tone.

"Ah, Rachel, you must hear the rest of the story before you jump to conclusions! So, I let the travellers scurry on their way, and made my way to the tower to rescue Princess Katherine. I couldn't imagine that she would be having much fun, trapped in a tower - she might be wanting to escape and become a theoretical physicist or some such."

Kitty stuck out her tongue, but Kurt soldiered on. "The white tower was very large, and, on closer inspection, turned out to be a giant version of our lighthouse. I couldn't see a dragon or a princess, but I could certainly see large smoke stains up the side of the tower, so I was sure that it wasn't far away. I jumped up to the lowest of the windows and peeked inside, and there it was - a great shiny red dragon, curled up fast asleep along a spiral staircase. I thought for a moment about running along it and up the staircase, but its back had little silver spines right down the middle, and they looked sharp. Also, little puffs of smoke came out of its nostrils as it snored, and I didn't want to have of a blast of flame up my backside."

"Good plan," Rachel said approvingly.

"So I climbed up the outside of the tower as high as I could go, but eventually the white stones were too smooth, even for me, so I climbed in the highest of the windows, well above the dragon's head. I climbed up the stairs as quietly as I could, but the dragon must have smelled me, or had some other kind of warning sense, because it immediately woke up and lunged up the stairs behind me!"

Kurt's nose had stopped bleeding, and he leapt to his feet, unable to stop himself demonstrating the thrilling moment, leaping forward as if he were the enormous dragon. Unfortunately, this meant that he stepped on the tail of a much smaller, much purpler dragon, and Lockheed erupted out of the quilt with a horrified yowl. Only Kurt's natural agility saved him from an ignominious tumble, and he ended up perched on one arm of the sofa bed, while Lockheed hissed at him from the other arm.

Kitty jumped up from the bunk and gathered Lockheed in her arms. "Don't worry, baby, Kurt's not going to hurt the dragon, are you, Kurt?" She plopped back down next to Rachel and stroked Lockheed, who cooed at her.

Kurt blinked, trying to follow Kitty's tangled sentence, but her frown gave him a quick route to comprehension. "No, no, there will be no hurting of dragons. The dragon lunged at me, as I said, and opened its mouth to bite me in two. Just as the huge teeth snapped shut on me, I teleported three feet backwards, and its teeth slammed shut on thin air!"

Lockheed hissed at Kurt again, but Kitty and Rachel leaned forward, enthralled. "Did it breathe fire then?" Rachel asked.

"Rachel, you are so bloodthirsty!" Kitty tutted. "Well, did it, Kurt?"

"No, Kitty! When the dragon's teeth slammed shut without catching a tasty morsel of mutant, it must have hurt, because it made a dreadful howl, and Princess Katherine came running down the stairs. She was almost in tears, and I made to sweep her up and away from the dragon, when she punched me right in the nose and started to shout at me. 'What are you doing to my dragon? Did you hurt her?' And then, while I held my bloody nose, she ran past me and petted the dragon right on its big red snout."

"She didn't need rescuing at all! Maybe there is some hope for Princess Me," Kitty mused.

"In fact, she turned around and said, 'If you hurt my Phoenix, I'll throw you right off this tower.' She did kindly show me to the interdimensional portal in her magic mirror, though, after I'd explained that it was all a misunderstanding."

"The dragon was called Phoenix?" Rachel looked shocked - it was the first time she'd heard of any parallel to herself, in any of the alternate dimensions. "And it was red, with silver spikes?" She gestured to herself, and she was suddenly wearing her spiky leather costume again, her telekinesis letting her reconstruct it at any time.

"Just that shade of red," Kurt nodded. "Which only tells me that perhaps we should not expect someone as special as you to appear in a form we expect."

"Ooh, Rachel's blushing!" Kitty giggled. "And it should also tell you that where there's a Kitty, there's a Rach." Rachel leaned away a little, but Kitty put Lockheed down at the end of the bunk and hugged her tight. "Even in your future it was true, you know. You should never think you're alone. 'Cos you've got me." Rachel resisted Kitty's hug for a good few seconds - as she always did, warring between her memories of the adult Kate of her past and the teenage Kitty of her present - but Kitty's insistence won her over, as usual, and she relaxed in Kitty's thin, strong arms, letting the fight seep out of her.

The train thundered through the surreal landscapes of the night, lit only by the faint glow of from the windows of the sleeper carriage, and by the warmth of the friendships within. A force stronger than chance had pulled them together, and, despite all the cross-dimensional, cross-time capers that the universe threw at them, that force kept them together, their lights aglow in the darkness.


End file.
